Category: N

Sometimes it’s not do or do not – it is try

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Dear N,

I’ve sat down and tried to write this letter to you a million times. I want to tell you how much you hurt me, how much I hate you, and how much I wish you had stayed under the rock you hid under for 3 years. But I can’t tell you those things because I don’t hate you. I’ve said it before but hate is easy. Hating you gives you power over me. Too many people have had power over me for too long. I need to reclaim my power. So no, I don’t hate you and I wish I did because that would make my feelings for you make sense and right now nothing makes sense. 

I could post the screenshots of every message that you’ve sent, every time you told me that you missed me and loved me. The times that you told me you wanted to be with me. I believed you. I thought that maybe after 3 years things had changed, I’ve grown, I’ve healed in a lot of ways, I thought you had too. Unfortunately I was wrong.

You ghosted me, for no reason that I can think of – just one day it was ‘poof’ and you were gone. I tried messaging you and no response, for a while I thought maybe you were busy and just couldn’t talk. Then I realized it was purposeful. You were choosing to ignore me. Choosing to not respond. And that, that hurt. I wish you had never messaged me again if that was your intention.

I’m not going to post the screenshots of our conversations, no one else needs to know what we said to one another. I know and you know. I know what you said, I know what I believed, but only you know what you meant. 

I’ve deleted you but I haven’t blocked you – I’m keeping the door open just in case you change your mind and decide to respond. 

I know these letter are meant to be unsent but I’m going to send you the link to this site and let you read them for yourself if you want – maybe you’ll respond, maybe you won’t. But I’ll know that I tried. I tried letting you in, I tried to restart things with you which is what you said you wanted, I tried. Sometimes it’s not do or do not but it is try. 

My DMs are open to you, my phone line is open to you – you just need to tell me the truth instead of telling me what you think I want to hear. 

-S

I only miss you when I drink

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Dear N,

I guess it makes sense that I miss you the most when I drink, I look back and realize now that I felt like I needed to drink before I saw you. I knew what you wanted from me every time you asked me to come over and I needed the alcohol to steal my nerves so I could relent. You only ever wanted one thing from me, even back then.

Every day I ask the same question countless times “have you ever been put in a situation where someone was making you feel like you couldn’t say ‘no’?” And I hate that you are one of the reasons I answer “yes” in my own head every time I ask it. I knew it 18 years ago and I know now that I could never say ‘no’ to you and have it be respected.

I realize now that I was nothing but a means to an end for you. I was just something for you to mark off your “bucket list” from 18 years ago and not someone you ever actually cared about then, or now. But I realize that we should have left things in the past. I shouldn’t have restarted anything with you, the first time, the second or this last time. You once called me “the love of your life” but that was a lie too. Everything between us is clouded by lies. Lies about how you felt, what you wanted, and even who you were.

I write this more to remind myself of your deplorable behavior than to grant you any kind of forgiveness or absolution. So that in 3 months, 6 months, a year, 5 years, or however long it takes for you to “miss” me I can look back and remember all the abuse you heaped on me and find the strength to ignore the message.

You’ve known me for over half our lives yet it’s painfully obvious that you never truly knew me at all. If you did you would have never thought so poorly of me as to make the accusations and threats that you did. If you knew me at all you would have remembered that I am someone who loves deeply and without condition, I am someone who gives from the heart and not out of whatever twisted motivation you ascribed to my generosity, I am someone who cannot bear to see my friends suffering if I know I can do something to help, I am the person who will pick you up off the ground when you’ve been crying and dust you off so you can remember that you are an amazing person, but above all else you would know that I am not someone you ever need to be afraid of or worried will harm you.

You become what you surround yourself with; energies, personalities, words and traits have a way of rubbing off. Unfortunately you insist on surrounding yourself with a very toxic, narcissistic individual who has poisoned you and twisted you to become more like her.

But I know you, I know the you who laughed at my jokes, the you who watched TV with me on the couch, the you who defended me when no one else did, the you who cares about family and friends, the you who has a passion and the you who has dreams and goals. But that you is gone now and it’d be easy to say that she’s the reason why that is but the reality is that you were the one who lost all of that somewhere along the way. You allowed her to infect you with her poison until you didn’t know any other way.

And that you is the one I had to drink to tolerate, because when I drink I remember the you that I know and not the one that lied to me, and said hateful hurtful things to me. I needed to drink so I could relax enough to not remember that you weren’t going to respect my ‘no’ despite how many times I said it. The more I drank the easier it was for me to just pretend that I was enjoying it and it let me get out of my head enough to convince you. Because I figured out that was the easiest way to get it to end, was to pretend to enjoy it. You treated me like a plaything, something you could set off to the side when I no longer served your purpose. By the end of our ‘relationship’ you weren’t even pretending that you wanted me for any other reason.

Hate is easy, it would be so nice if I could just hate you. But I don’t. At the end of the day I remember who you truly are not just who you’ve become. So, in 3 months, 6 months, a year, 5 years, however long it takes I’ll still read your message when you tell me you “miss” me. And I’ll have to remind myself of all the things that you put me through, all the things you said to me and hope I have the strength to ignore you.

Love Always,
S

The 3rd Strike I Didn’t Know Was Coming

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Dear N,
4 months…that’s the length of time between when you abandoned me the last time and when you texted me and told me that you missed me again. 4 months is also the length of time it took for me to let my guard down just a little bit and for you to decide I wasn’t worth the effort again.
I don’t know much about sports but I do know that you get 3 strikes before you’re out and apparently I was on my 3rd strike with you and didn’t even know it. I’m here again wondering what happened between us that put you in a position of thinking your only way out was to ghost me again and just stop talking to me. After 72 hours of trying to talk to you and having my messages ignored I finally got the hint.
They say that hurt people hurt people and I guess you and I are just two hurt people who can’t stop hurting each other. I was willing to give you space and time to figure out what was bothering you and I foolishly hoped you would start talking to me again but I guess I was wrong. I was willing to acknowledge my part in hurting you and trying to figure out the path forward but I couldn’t do it alone. It would be easy to blame you for everything and paint myself as the victim of another person who abandoned me. But I wouldn’t do that, it’d be tainting the memories of everything we shared and shrouding it in a veil of hatred and pain.
I loved you, I still love you – that hasn’t changed since the first time I saw you 18 years ago. I don’t know when it changed for you, but somewhere along the way I stopped being someone you loved. I don’t blame you, I’m hard to love. But you were always willing to try until now. I don’t know what happened and maybe I never will but it was the bottom of the 9th with 2 outs and I was willing to swing for the fences. Unfortunately I didn’t know that I had 2 strikes and was going for my 3rd.
Just please know that I still love you and miss you. I’m willing to figure it out but only if you are right there beside me.

Love,
S

How a Bag of Takeout Was a Reclamation of My Power

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For the first time in 3 months I ate food from one of my favorite restaurants. While this might not seem like a big deal, when you live with Complex PTSD your life becomes about navigating triggers and this restaurant was a trigger I didn’t even know existed.

3 months ago I met the person I reference in one of my earlier letters at this restaurant. We’d been apart for 17 years and decided to go out as friends and catch up on our lives. As someone who struggles with complex PTSD and relational trauma I have issues cultivating and maintaining healthy relationships and boundaries. Unfortunately, this person seized upon my vulnerabilities (wether he knew it or not) and after that night began a “relationship” with me. I use the quotation marks around the word because looking back now, I can see what happened between the two of us wasn’t a relationship, it was a way for him to use me and I allowed it.

Which brings me to the restaurant. I love Olive Garden, there’s nothing like the unlimited bread sticks and carbohydrate loaded happiness one can find in a bowl of pasta. But, this was where I met him that night and this was where he whispered all those things in my ear that my traumatized brain so desperately wanted to hear and have be true. That night was when I started allowing myself to be used by him for his own selfish gratification and needs without listening to what my head was saying and establishing healthy boundaries.

So, I couldn’t bring myself to go back. When he abruptly ended things, I was back to being in a dark place mentally and I reacted in ways that were less than healthy and ideal. I took his behavior of ghosting me as a judgement on me as a person and absorbed the pain and decided that once again it was something I had done wrong that had caused another person to abandon me, again. I took it as a personal failing that he had abandoned me, obviously if I’d been better, prettier, more attentive, more flexible, just better than I was then he wouldn’t have left. I was reliving and replaying all of the times my family had walked away from me over the years and taking on all of that pain all over again. So, I avoided one of my favorite restaurants because it reminded me of that night and brought up all those feelings again. It was triggering me and I didn’t even realize it.

So, tonight, for the first time in 3 months and a month after he ghosted me I ordered takeout from the restaurant. I couldn’t bring myself to go inside the restaurant but at least this was a step in the right direction. I could be in the parking lot, smell the smell of the bread sticks, hear the cheesy Italian music being piped through the speakers, and not want to crawl out of my own skin and hide.

I reclaimed just a little bit of my power tonight and it felt great.

To The Man Who Hurt Me After 17 Years Apart

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Note: This letter, in part, was sent to the individual. I have removed some parts and rewritten others in an attempt to protect their anonymity

Dear N,

I’ve started this letter half a dozen times and I don’t know if I am going to get everything out, get it right or get through it at all. My therapist encourages me to write letters to people as part of my healing journey, people who I’ve wronged, people who have wronged me, people who have played a part in the tapestry of my life for better or worse. I thought you were going to make my life better, I thought you were going to be a light at the end of the dark tunnel I’ve created for myself. But, in the true fashion of my life that was not going to be reality but rather the dreams of a fanciful girl who loves to watch Casablanca hoping Rick gets on the plane with Ilsa in the end, who watches An Affair to Remember and wishes that Terry and Nickie will meet at the top of the Empire State building and the credits will roll on a beautiful kiss. But none of those things happen, Ilsa gets on the plane with Victor, Terry gets into a car accident and misses the reunion – and you and I were, whatever we were.

The fact is, I fell in love with you 17 years ago – I fell in love with the way you made me feel, the way you made me think, the way that you were when I was around you and I carried that love with me for 17 years hoping for some sort of magical reunion. Hoping, against all the odds, that you were out there thinking of me too. And a couple of months ago when I was admittedly feeling vulnerable and low, I reached out to you and I’m sorry for that. I’m not sorry for reaching out, I wanted to do it for a multitude of reasons, a multitude of times over the years. I’m sorry because I was inadvertently using you to validate that in some way to some person I was of value. I was looking for someone to tell me that I wasn’t a worthless bitch, cunt, piece of shit. And I used you for that validation and I shouldn’t have. You paid attention to me and told me everything that I wanted to hear.

I didn’t go to the restaurant that night intending to start a relationship with you, sitting next to you in the movie theater that night I wasn’t trying to think about where it could go from there. I don’t regret any part of that night, I don’t regret any part of the rest of the times we were able to sneak away together – wrapped up in your embrace I felt safe, I felt calmed, I felt all of the things I felt 17 years ago the first time you kissed me. I don’t remember exactly how it happened all those years ago; I remember a lot of things from that original relationship, but I don’t remember the first time you kissed me and now I won’t be able to remember the last time because I didn’t know it was going to be the last. It’s funny how that goes, you never think the last time is going to be the last. If you did, you’d be able to snap a photograph in your mind and carry it with you always. But instead I didn’t know it was going to be the last time I saw you, the last time I felt your embrace, the last time I’d be able to kiss you so I filed it away like an average, every day occurrence something that I’d be able to do for the rest of my life without thinking or worrying that it’d be the last time.

Did you know? When you kissed me that last time, did you know it’d be the last? Were you anticipating ending things with me and just didn’t know how to tell me? Were you lost in the sea of regret about starting something with me that you didn’t know how to get out of anymore? You called me the love of your life, were you lying? Were you telling me things you thought I wanted to hear, that I needed to hear? I want to trust you and believe you when you said I made you happier than you’ve been in a very long time, that when you told me you loved me you meant it. We were saying it so routinely that maybe I started to take it for granted that you felt that way. It became a reflex, we’d say it over and over again that maybe it lost all meaning for you and it became something you just said out of routine or habit.

I sent the “gift” you gave me back to you purely because I can’t have that constant reminder of you and what I thought I meant to you in my space. You gave it to me and told me you loved me and every time I looked at it I could hear you say those words all over again and it broke me. I couldn’t bear to throw it away either, it felt wasteful and I foolishly thought sending it back to you might leave you with a reminder of me and bring you some peace or joy when you think of me.

I know that my trauma and navigating my triggers and my moods is hard, it’s hard for me to navigate and I can’t imagine being on the outside looking in and knowing you want to help but can’t. I’d love to be able to pinpoint exactly what my triggers are so that I can articulate when they occur and help others navigate them with me but unfortunately, I can’t. The best I can do is acknowledge the hurt I cause when I’m triggered and try to make some sort of amends. Relationships are hard for me, trust is hard for me, trusting in relationships is something that I have to work on every day and while I’m getting better, I’m not there yet. I want you to know, I do trust you – that was never in doubt for me, it may have been for you. You may have felt like I wasn’t letting you in or something but that’s not what happened. If I didn’t trust you I wouldn’t have tried leaning in to you when I was feeling untethered like I was that last night, I wouldn’t have shown you the vulnerable parts of myself and let you see the parts that aren’t pretty.

Now, you’ve unfriended me, you’ve cut off all communication and I’m, once again as is my lot in life, left wondering what I did wrong. This is my last-ditch effort to get some things said that I think needed to be said. Please know that I want nothing but the best for you, I wish you could have known how happy you made me and, even for the briefest moment, I hope I made you happy too. I wish you light, love, and a fulfilling life that brings you peace, joy, and pride.

Always yours,

S